Belief 01
Boring beats heroic.
The site that never goes down is worth more than the site that gets rescued brilliantly at 2am. Every heroic recovery is a prevention failure — one I'd rather not have to celebrate.
What I
believe.
Six positions I've held long enough that clients can predict what I'll say before I say it. The operating beliefs behind a 150+ site fleet.
Belief 02
One named engineer, not a queue.
Ticket queues optimise for the vendor, not the client. Every site I care for has one person on WhatsApp who knows its history, its plugins, and its edge cases. That person is usually me.
Belief 03
Rollbacks before rollouts.
No update ships to a client site without a documented, tested path to undo it. If I can't get back to the last-known-good state in under five minutes, the change doesn't ship.
Belief 04
Rankings are earned in prevention, lost in cleanup.
A hacked site with a botched malware cleanup loses three years of SEO in three days. The 410-vs-404 decision matters more than the malware scanner you ran.
Belief 05
The report is the product.
The written incident report — entry vector, timeline, what changed — is what the client actually keeps. The fix is the deliverable. The report is the education.
Belief 06
Cheap hosting is expensive.
$4/month shared hosting reinfects itself. I'll tell you honestly when the problem is your neighbour, not your site, and I won't clean the same site twice on a stack that guarantees a third infection.